A Beer a Day May Help Men Make Babies

Beer, is there anything it isn’t good for? New research presented at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine suggests that drinking beer will actually help men conceive children. In an eight-year study, men who drank alcohol had better sexual function than men who abstained. And because this is a scientific paper on having sex we get fun phrases like this: “men who did not consume alcohol were more likely to report deficiencies in their erections.” Scientists have an uncanny way of making sex sound like the least sexy thing possible. In addition, a second study showed that men who drink a pint of beer a day had a 57 percent chance of having a successful IVF (in vitro fertilization) session. That was almost double the rate of men who drank rarely or never and those results couldn’t be tied to any other factor like weight or age.

While beer helps, coffee seems to have the opposite effect. Subjects who drank two cups of a coffee a day had only a 19 percent chance of successful IVF.

Though the results for this study seem pretty clear, the reasoning behind them is not. Dr. Allan Pacey speculates that “moderate social drinking can be of benefit…because it helps reduce stress.” But that sounds pretty unscientific. What we do know is that a whole lot of husbands will be more than happy to start listing bar trips as “family planning sessions” on the calendar.